They say no one tournament should mean too much, but I, along with many other Irish players I’m sure, can’t help but feel a little more pain than usual when getting knocked out of the Irish Open.

As poker players, you know you can’t control luck, but Good Friday is the one day of the year you really hope for luck not to go against you. Unfortunately, the one day of the year you don’t want to have bad luck, I got some, and was knocked out after 3 hours. I don’t particularly want to relive the hands so suffice to say after losing some pots early on, my bustout hand involved getting 20% of my stack in pre, another 20% on the flop, and the remaining 60% in on the turn. I was roughly 80% to win pre-flop, 86% on the flop, 70% on the turn and 0% on the river. Read more…

I think I can safely say that the last few weeks has been the busiest I have been since I did the Leaving Cert. I’m sure on the grand scale of things, I’m still one of the less busy people in the world, but for me, it was a fairly hectic few weeks. Three treks up and down to Cork, two trips to Dublin and a week in Belfast with organising, college and a bit of cash action in between meant I didn’t really get enough time to fit in a blog post. (And as I said at the start of the year, I think it’s better to wait and make a proper post instead of rushing it or just making a post for the sake of it). Read more…

For those of you unfamiliar of how a cash league works, it’s really quite simple. Your task is to play X amount of cash game hours in a certain time frame, for example, 60 hours in 3 months. During that 3 months, 1 euro is taken from every hand played. At the end of the 3 months, all those euros are added together, and whoever has played the 60 hours either gains a share of the money or has a freeroll in a tournament with the money collected as the prizepool.

Recently, a certain player who hadn’t been seen for a few weeks appeared in the club with 6 days remaining in the cash league. With 27 hours to make up in 6 days, he knew it was going to be no easy task to reach the 60 hour quota. Read more…

I can’t complain. I’ve been finding myself saying that a lot lately when asked ‘how is the poker going?’

It definitely hasn’t been going swimmingly but at the same time it’s not like I’m on a monster downswing that I feel I will never see the end of. So in short, I can’t complain.

After some debate with myself, I decided to go with some high(er) variance decisions to start 2013 and decided to play three MTTs in February. Grinding and low variance is all well and good, but Read more…

Where does all the time go, another year down. At the start of 2012 I didn’t really have any concrete goals. I posted in this blog that “I just want to focus on improving the small things, because in time, that’s what leads to the big things.”. With such a general goal, I think it’s impossible to say whether it was a success or failure! Overall, I guess I’m pretty happy but not ecstatic with 2012. There was no one moment so big that it ensured it was a great year, but on the other hand, there wasn’t too many bad moments either. It depends on what way you look at it I guess. Compared with 2011, I didn’t win as much money. Compared to my expectations, it was probably a little below par in some areas. Compared to how bad it could have been, it was pretty good. Comparing my year to years of other people of similar age, demographic etc. I have to think I was pretty lucky. So I guess there’s lots of ways of looking at things, but overall, I have to say I’m reasonably happy with my 2012. It’s my third winning year in a row from poker so I guess that’s the main thing! Read more…

Tournament details are below with start time and buy-ins! Each tournament starts with 2000 chips has 2 rebuys (2000 chips) at $1 and 1 top-up (5000 chips) at the break for $1.

Tournament

Date

Time

Buy-in

UL Exclusive poker tournament

22nd of December

20 : 00

$3 + $0.30

UL Exclusive poker tournament

28th of December

20 : 00

$3 + $0.30

UL Exclusive poker tournament

3rd of January

20 : 00

$3 + $0.30

The winners of each exclusive tournament will also get access to an exclusive 9 seater Irish Student game on 888poker for one of 4 Dublin superstack tickets and an extra $100 into their 888 poker account!

I busted the EMOP Dublin a few hours ago coming 26th with 18 getting paid. I peaked at 170k and the average stack when the bubble broke was 140k. There was a 178k stack at the final table, with two stacks shorter than that. Read more…

The first poker championship of this year will take place this Wednesday in the Sports Bar at 6.30pm. The UL Poker Championship bracelet (worth about €100) is up for grabs!

If you register before 1pm on Wednesday, you will receive a meal at the Sports Bar at 6pm on Wednesday. We have a late licence, free drink for the first 10 people knocked out and finger food and The Sports Bar also have drink promotions, to make the night an enjoyable night for everyone.

For any weekly poker game, if an individual participates in a poker hand and has not registered to be a member; that individual can only win 50% of any cash prizes advertised at that weekly poker game.

The committee may grant an exception to this rule only if the individual in question is a member of another University poker society prior to the start of the weekly poker game.